Maryland Lawmakers Considering Limitations On School Cloud Providers

The House Ways and Means Committee of the Maryland General Assembly is scheduled to hear today a measure that would prevent cloud providers from using student data for most commercial purposes.

The measure, which is similar to recently approved legislation in Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Arizona would prohibit cloud providers from using student information from school records, digital documentation, emails, and files for marketing and other commercial functions. Moreover, the bill would ban cloud providers from selling or forwarding any student data to third parties. Supporters of the measure maintain that the bill protects the privacy of students who attend school in Maryland.

According to supporters of the bill, many Maryland schools accepted free or very low-cost services from cloud providers without restricting the way these vendors use the information made available to them from student records. They claim that some of these providers mine the data to determine such information as student age, race, and religion. In addition, supporters of the measure worry that cloud providers gain access to sensitive information such as test scores, health, attendance, family background, disciplinary problems, and grades.

State legislatures in other states are also investigating the possibility of enacting laws that would prevent cloud providers and other technology vendors from using student information for commercial purposes. In many cases, lawmakers are considering bills based on a model proposed by the American Legislative Exchange Council. The template encompasses the establishment of an education chief privacy officer who would be charged with creating and overseeing an inventory of all student information available to cloud providers as well as enforcing state and federal security and privacy rules.

The Oklahoma Legislature recently enacted a law that precludes the use of student information for any commercial, non-educational purposes. The measure requires transparency from cloud vendors about where data is stored and who has access to it. Similar measures are being considered by lawmakers in New York, and Massachusetts.

Recent

Surprising Facts and Stats – Online Security It’s easy to get lulled into a false sense of security when browsing the web. As more and more devices join the internet of things, the risk of becoming a victim of a criminal cyber gang is increasing – we have more unsecured access points and offer would-be…

World Backup Day: Understand The Data You Are Protecting Did you know that 113 phones are lost or stolen every minute? What about the fact that 1 in 10 computers are infected with a virus every month? Thanks to World Backup Day, an independent initiative that was started in 2011, awareness is being raised about…

The E-Learning Market We’ve talked a fair bit about e-Learning and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) technologies here on CloudTweaks over the past number of years. The industry is expected to continue to grow at a brisk pace as more and more firms and educational institutions start to adopt cloud based services. Docebo has an excellent…

Popular

The Future Of Big Data Big Data is BIG business and will continue to be one of the more predominant areas of focus in the coming years from small startups to large scale corporations. We’ve already covered on CloudTweaks how Big Data can be utilized in a number of interesting ways from preventing world hunger to helping teams win…

15 Emerging Technologies To Watch Before 2020 The cloud, big data, the internet of things, and wearable technology have all featured heavily in Forrester’s latest list of fifteen technologies to watch before 2020. It is becoming a reality for businesses that they need to adapt and change to an increasingly technologically-minded customer base. Traditional marketing…

The Cloud In 2015 For organizations of all sizes, in 2014 the cloud emerged as a critical part of the default consideration set when implementing any new application – in large part due to the cloud’s proven ability to handle data storage and processing demands in an elastic manner, improved verifiable standards around data security and…

The Internet of Things Is About To Explode By 2020, Gartner estimates that the Internet of Things (IoT) will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion worldwide. It’s an astoundingly large figure given that the sector barely existed three years ago. We are now rapidly evolving toward a world in which just about everything will become…

Why Hybrid Cloud Delivers Better Business Agility A CIO friend of mine once told me that a hybrid cloud model enables him to “own the base, rent the spike” when it comes to unplanned events. Let’s face it – maintaining unused infrastructure for rare or random IT events is expensive and unnecessary in a cloud…

Sponsored Posts

How CYOD Helps Make Hybrid Cloud More Productive and More Secure Recent analysis by IDG/DELL has found that companies are expecting “increased IT efficiencies” and “lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) with optimized application delivery” as they move toward hybrid cloud and private cloud deployment. In short, they expect things to work better and cost…

Cloud Logo Sponsors

Contributor Spotlight

Established in 2009, CloudTweaks is recognized as one of the leading influencers in cloud computing, big data and internet of things (IoT) information. Our goal is to continue to build our growing information portal, by providing the best in-depth articles, interviews, event listings, whitepapers, infographics and much more.